of themselves filled
up the blanks in the Macedonian population, partly given opportunity
to the government to take serious steps towards rectifying this which
was really the weak point of the land. Philip urged the Macedonians
to marry and raise up children; he occupied the coast towns, whose
inhabitants he carried into the interior, with Thracian colonists of
trusty valour and fidelity. He formed a barrier on the north to check
once for all the desolating incursions of the Dardani, by converting
the space intervening between the Macedonian frontier and the
barbarian territory into a desert, and by founding new towns in the
northern provinces. In short he took step by step the same course in
Macedonia, as Augustus afterwards took when he laid afresh the
foundations of the Roman empire. The army was numerous--30,000 men
without reckoning contingents and hired troops--and the younger men
were well exercised in the constant border warfare with the Thracian
barbarians. It is strange that Philip did not try, like Hannibal, to
organize his army after the Roman fashion; but we can understand it
when we recollect the value which the Macedonians set upon their
phalanx, often conquered, but still withal believed to be invincible.
Through the new sources of revenue which Philip had created in mines,
customs, and tenths, and through the flourishing state of agriculture
and commerce, he had succeeded in replenishing his treasury,
granaries, and arsenals. When the war began, there was in the
Macedonian treasury money enough to pay the existing army and 10,000
hired troops for ten years, and there were in the public magazines
stores of grain for as long a period (18,000,000 medimni or 27,000,000
bushels), and arms for an army of three times the strength of the
existing one. In fact, Macedonia had become a very different state
from what it was when surprised by the outbreak of the second war with
Rome. The power of the kingdom was in all respects at least doubled:
with a power in every point of view far inferior Hannibal had been
able to shake Rome to its foundations.

Attempted Coalition against Rome

Its external relations were not in so favourable a position. The
nature of the case required that Macedonia should now take up the
plans of Hannibal and Antiochus, and should try to place herself at
the head of a coalition of all oppressed states against the supremacy
of Rome; and certainly threads of intrigue ramified in all